I don't understand a lot of what's been said about evaluating these search engines, but I'll comment anyway.
Thanks, appreciated. Much of what's been said is just me having fun.
Since, for me at least, easy to use but full-featured search software is a vital part of any archive, the ideal search engine should be powerful, yet intuitive to operate, or come with good instructions. A tutorial would be helpful.
That's a great point. Once we've settled on which search software to use, I promise to make sure there's a "help" link leading to some examples. In the meantime, here's some documentation from the two vendors. To my eye, they are both offer ridiculously overpowered. Kind of like monster trucks. :) PyLucene: http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/queryparsersyntax.html. Xapian: http://www.xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html
I'd like to be able to search the results of an earlier search.
Here's an example of two searches. The second will return a subset of the first. "Mac Oglesby" "Mac Oglesby" AND machines Xapian even has a super fancy algorithm that tries to figure out subtopics within search results. It is way too confusing for my taste, but you can see it action below. Apparently the software thinks you are into dipleidoscopes and ebay. Are you? http://www.mail-archive.com/cgi-bin/omega/omega?P=%22Mac+Oglesby%22&DEFAULTOP=or&DB=sundial%40rrz.uni-koeln.de&FMT=query.orig&xP=Rmac.Roglesby.machin.&xDB=sundial%40rrz.uni-koeln.de&xFILTERS=--O _______________________________________________ Discussion list for The Mail Archive Gossip@jab.org http://jab.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gossip
